


oh, and heavens, when you looked at me

by neville



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Coming Out, Dubious Science, Honesty, M/M, Non-Binary Bucky Barnes, Poetry, Rescue, Rescue Missions, Talking, They talk a lot, They/Them Pronouns for Bucky Barnes, Trans Bruce Banner, Very Dubious Science, bruce is a gentle soul, radiation, sorry people who know anything about science, there's some Longing, they talk about Poetry bcus it's Gay, why let real science get in the way of a plot idea?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 06:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20353573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neville/pseuds/neville
Summary: Bruce is quarantined after a rescue mission; Bucky takes it upon himself to visit. He likes to listen to Bruce talk.





	oh, and heavens, when you looked at me

_ stars  
_ _ they come and go  
_ __ they come fast, they come slow

nina simone,  _ stars _

  
  


The bunker reminds Bucky of thousands of his bad dreams: it’s dark and dull grey and filled with torturous-looking machinery, and in the crevices of his mind he can hear whispers in Russian as he walks, gun held tightly in his hands. Sam is canvassing above and Wanda is behind him, but he still doesn’t feel particularly safe: this is the kind of place where it feels as if he could be ambushed on any corner. 

He dispatches a door guard and pulls the ID card from his lanyard, swiping it. The door has a series of biohazard warnings next to it, serving as signs that Bucky is heading the right way. It’s a labyrinth here, a well-constructed mass of tunnels leading off into more and more; it’s impossible to have a sense of direction, and it’s more through luck and the sounds of guards yelling that they’ve been able to divine the route so far. Wanda also says that she can sense Bruce’s energy, a tortured mass of gamma radiation and pain, but that it’s so strong she’s not sure she could pinpoint it to a specific area. She can just  _ feel _ it. For Bucky, the entire complex feels like pain. 

The machinery in the next room looks significantly more heavy duty, and Bucky swallows. This is the kind of equipment designed to keep someone  _ big _ contained, and some of it is stained with blood. The room is empty, though: Bucky suspects they’re almost there, because no guard would stay near a ticking time bomb under threat of invasion. There’s another set of doors, and he swipes again. It seems that they took care of most of the personnel earlier on, though they still haven’t seen head nor tail of the operation’s leaders. It’s likely that they’re still out there. 

The room takes a turn to the right, and Bucky pauses at the wall; he peers into the next room first, eyes scanning for hostiles, and stops in his shock. 

Trapped inside a massive square of glass, as if he’s Hannibal Lecter, is Bruce; it’s not the presence of the glass that surprises Bucky but its thickness. The glass is impenetrably thick, almost as wide as the bicep of Bucky’s metal arm, and though it’s cracked in several places, it’s clearly held against the might of the Hulk. If the SHIELD intel is correct and that the Hulk’s strength multiplies as he gets angrier, then… 

Bucky doesn’t want to think about how incredibly premeditated this must have been. 

Bruce himself is standing in the centre of his cell; the branches of his veins are full with tubes and wires leading to various machines that he has to pull along behind him, and his skin is vaguely tinted green. He’s small again, though, looking old in the grey of his curls, and  _ tired _ . But his arms are battle-scarred, red and marked by all the times he seems to have pulled his wires out; for a man so small and innocuous, Bucky thinks, he’s much more resilient than he seems. Perhaps that’s just the way of it when your life revolves around the danger inside. 

He walks up to the glass, pressing his hands against it and gazing at Bucky for a moment. Then he points at the radioactive sticker on the glass and to himself. 

“He’s radioactive,” Wanda says. “What have they been  _ doing  _ to him?”

“It doesn’t matter,” says Bucky. “We need to get him out. Watch the door.” 

He ventures further into the room, stalking around Bruce’s cell. He can see movement from the corner of his eye as Bruce begins to tug his wires out again – he pulls off things that are simply attached to his skin first, and Bucky has to look away when Bruce hooks his fingers around the tubes emerging from his nose and pulls. He can still hear the sound of choking behind him, and shudders, picking his way through monitoring equipment and boxes of what’s labelled as radioactive material. There  _ has _ to be something here, something to help him get Bruce out safely –

_ There _ . On the floor, a folded pile of hazmat clothing, complete with protective helmet: Bucky scoops them up and jogs back to the entrance of Bruce’s cell. “Have you got the first aid kit with you?” he asks Wanda; she tosses it to him. “Get outside. I’ll help him out.” 

She gives him one of those  _ looks _ , one that suggests that she’s probably the only level-headed person on the team, and says, “I’ll stand in the next room”. Bucky nods. 

There’s no card reader on the door to the cell; instead, there’s a keypad, and Bruce flashes the numbers on his hands. The heart rate monitor, when it had still been on, showed that his pulse was accelerated, and Bucky can see the tremble in his hands, but still he keeps going, determined and fierce. There’s a fire in his eyes. 

Finally, the keypad buzzes, and the door opens itself with a pneumatic hiss. Bucky tosses the first aid pack and the clothes into the cell, and Bruce quickly yanks out the rest of the tubes inside of him, blood spurting out. He covers most of the marks with plasters, and tapes some cotton wool over anything that continues to bleed. He’s medically efficient, and pulls on the hazmat suit, his small figure dwarfed by its size. 

“Let’s go,” Bucky says. Bruce nods. 

“Thanks,” he says, his voice muffled through the suit. 

“No problem.”

  
  


Against Bucky’s protests, Bruce is quarantined in a SHIELD facility until his radiation levels stabilise and are no longer dangerous. He goes through a chemical shower, first, and then while he’s still shivering and only wearing sweatpants, he’s pushed into his new cell. It’s cushier than the one in the bunker. Bucky is sitting on the other side; he can’t say  _ why _ , really, except that he knows what it’s like to be trapped in a cell and that Bruce doesn’t deserve to be alone after all that. He looks terrible, still, worn-out, and he takes a seat opposite Bucky. 

“Do you know when they’re bringing me a shirt?” he asks dryly. Bucky shakes his head. Bruce nods, and runs a hand through his hair with a gentle sigh. 

Several minutes later, through the post box at the side of his cell, Bruce is given a shirt, a bottle of water, and a tablet. He pulls the shirt on and then downs the water. Bucky is aware that he’s still watching, and also aware that Bruce doesn’t seem to mind. It feels as if he’s de-stressing in every moment that he gets to take for himself. 

The tablet is Stark-made, and with a gentle sigh of relief, Bruce says  _ Friday, play Shark Smile by Big Thief _ and lays himself down, back pressed to the cold floor of his cell. His tablet is playing music that Bucky inevitably doesn’t recognise, but that he likes. 

It takes him a while to realise that Bruce has fallen asleep. With a breathy laugh, Bucky picks himself up from the floor, and goes back to the Facility. 

  
  


He runs laps around the Facility with Sam the next morning, and watches the news with Wanda as they eat breakfast, but still he can’t shake the thoughts of that massive grey bunker and by noon he arrives at the holding facility. Bruce has some books, now. He’s reading Mary Shelley’s  _ Frankenstein _ when Bucky arrives, a book that even  _ he’s _ familiar with. Bruce peers up over the frames of his glasses. 

“I’m going to be radioactive for a while,” he says. 

“I know,” Bucky says. Bruce puts down the book. There’s the flicker in his eye of wanting to say something: Bucky recognises it as the precursor to many an informal lesson on twenty-first century science, society, and occasionally television, if Bruce is feeling particularly jovial. He waits for the pronouncement. 

“Have you heard of Ada Lovelace?” Bruce asks.

Bucky shakes his head. “No.”

“She’s the only daughter of Lord Byron. The poet:  _ for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction _ . I studied him in high school. Ada was a mathematician and one of the world’s first computer programmers, back in the seventeenth century.” 

“I didn’t think there were computers then.”

“They were the earliest computers. Stuff like Charles Babbage’s proposed difference and analytical engines. But those were number-crunchers; that was the focus of computer technology in the Victorian era.” Bruce pauses, leaning forward and resting his head in his hands. “Ada envisioned the computer as going beyond calculation. In the eighteen hundreds.” Bucky realises that the lecture doesn’t have a thought, that Bruce is just  _ thinking _ : he thinks at a hundred miles an hour, incessantly, constantly, his fingers jabbing out thoughts even when he isn’t in front of his computer. “I think about her a lot.” 

“I didn’t know about her.”

“People don’t, actually. But I think she was amazing.” 

Bucky nods. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t always care what Bruce is talking about: he just knows that it matters that he listens. That’s all Bruce needs: somebody to listen to him think. Bucky has figured that out in his time with the Avengers. Bruce may scarcely talk about his feelings in the relevant words, but if Ada Lovelace means something else to him then so be it. 

Bucky is glad he came. It feels good, doing something  _ good _ . He’s steeped in his own personal history of death. This is… better. 

  
  


When he next visits, they talk about music for a while. They listen to a song that Bucky remembers from the thirties or forties, and then one that Bruce likes, and Bruce tells Bucky about advancements in music technology: electric guitars and amps, synthesisers, software, loopers. Bucky listens intently to all of these stories of a world he wasn’t really aware of, and nods, interjecting to ask questions every now and then. Bruce is a patient teacher. He finds pictures and videos on his tablet and they talk for so long that lunchtime comes round; the staff make some sandwiches for Bucky, too, and he gets a bottle of orange juice. 

“What does  _ transgender  _ mean?” he asks as they eat. Bruce looks up. “I read it in an article about you.”

Bruce puts down his sandwich and wrings his hands for several moments in which Bucky wonders if he’s asked something insensitive. “It means,” he says slowly, as if capturing words from the buzz of his mind with a small net, “that I was born a woman.”

“But you’re a man,” Bucky says. Bruce laughs, but not unkindly. 

“That’s the point,” he says, resuming eating his sandwich. “That’s what the scars on my chest are. They’re not battle scars, but from when I had my mastectomy. They call it top surgery. Steve let me stay with him after I had it done.” Bruce smiles, one of those soft ones that’s real and rare. “We had only just become the Avengers when Tony paid in full for my surgery and Steve helped me with recovery.” 

Bucky nods, trying to understand: it’s not  _ easy  _ to understand, not when there has been a whole world tilted on its axis while he’s been gone. When he finds the time and the energy, he reads and reads, sheafs of things he never knew and things that happened quietly or not so. Sometimes he gets the distinct feeling that he’ll never really know how the world works anymore. People, places, the words on pages… nothing is the same. 

“When you’re transgender, the way you feel doesn’t match the sex you were born with,” Bruce says. 

“The way you feel?” 

“It’s hard to explain.” 

“So – you – feel like a man.” 

“Yeah.”

“I don’t…” 

“It’s okay. I know they weren’t very good about this kind of thing in the forties; or even when I came out, in the eighties; or even now, sometimes, on the news.” Bruce pauses, crumbs from his sandwich dropping onto the grey fabric of his sweats as he turns the bread over and over in his hands with thought. “The way we’re starting to see things now is different. Personal identification. We’re finding words for what’s essentially kinda ineffable.” He takes a bite of his sandwich. “Do you feel like a man, Bucky?” 

“I don’t know what it means to feel like a man.” 

“When you think about yourself, and about your identity, do you feel as if your personal identity encompasses maleness?” 

Bucky pauses, and he thinks about it; he thinks about it for a long time as they keep eating, and he takes a swig of his orange juice, and when he looks back at Bruce he realises that Bruce might have just discovered something, gently inserted a key into Bucky’s chest and turned it. “No,” he says, and swallows. “Am I – transgender?” 

Bruce shrugs. “There are other identities. People who feel as if they don’t have a gender; people who feel as if they’re a mix of both; people who only feel partially aligned with a gender.” 

“I don’t think I have a gender.” 

“Okay.” 

“Is there a word for that?” 

“Agender. But you can use non-binary, too. That’s the umbrella term.” 

Bucky leans back on his haunches for a moment.

It feels somewhat as if his entire internal world has imploded, but also as if he shouldn’t make a fuss about it. 

“You can do some reading on it,” Bruce says. “You don’t have to decide what you are now. Equally, you’re allowed to change your mind. This isn’t an exact science.” He laughs. “I think I prefer exact sciences. Numbers. Repeatable experiments, always with the same results. Equations. Observability.” 

“I like it when I shoot and it hits the target.” 

“Yeah, exactly.” 

  
  


Bucky reads up on gender, for a while. He talks to Sam about it one evening, and asks if it would be okay if Sam used different pronouns now, maybe they and them instead of he and him. Sam doesn’t mind at all. Bucky is surprised.

When they arrive at the cell next, they say, “I read some Byron”. Bruce looks up. “I didn’t understand it.” 

“I’m not very good at old poetry either.”

“I liked the part where he said  _ in the desert a fountain is springing / in the wide waste there is still a tree / and a bird in the solitude singing / which speaks to my spirit of thee _ .” 

“You memorised it?” 

Bucky nods. On a sleepless night they had spent a long time reading poetry by the glaring blue sight of the computer screen; they had read for so long that the words had begun to blur together and that nothing made sense, and when they had come to the next morning, that had been the stanza left on their screen. They didn’t know why, but they had committed it to memory, murmuring the lines over and over like a prayer. 

“Do you want to watch some of the footage from the moon launch?” Bruce asks. Bucky nods. 

Bruce takes his tablet and sits just by the pane of glass that divides them, tilting it more for Bucky’s benefit than his own; but in the act of sitting so close, Bucky feels as if there is almost no pane of glass at all, and as if they can feel the shoulder of Bruce pressed against their own and the movement of his shoulders as he breathes. 

They start crying at some point during the footage. Bruce doesn’t notice, and for that, Bucky is glad. 

Life is supposed to be normal – they have routine, things to do, friends, a place to live, their brain isn’t fucked anymore; but somehow, they feel like they’re detached, a thousand miles away. But there’s something about Bruce that’s just  _ calm _ . Bruce likes to talk and Bucky likes to listen and they learn about the whole world through the sound of Bruce’s voice; it’s strange, probably, but Bruce’s tendency to launch into explanations of things to them just  _ helps _ . Bucky gets filled in on things that they didn’t even know they needed filled in on. They don’t need to think when Bruce is talking, or to worry.

“Can you bring some pizza next time you come?” Bruce asks. “I’m sick of the food here.”

“Okay,” says Bucky. They rest their head against the glass. “I watched this film,  _ The Silence of the Lambs _ , once.” 

“It’s good,” says Bruce. 

“I thought about the connection that they could build without touching. Just by talking. But also I saw the series, I watched it with Sam, and I think – is there something missing when you can’t  _ touch _ someone? Or at least it be a possibility.”

“Sure. Maybe.” 

“I don’t like the glass.” 

“Me neither, but what I’m sure you’d like less is vomiting and organ damage.” Bruce shifts, setting down his tablet. “I know what you mean. For a long time I stayed away from people and tried to live on my own, so that there was no risk that I would ever hurt anybody, back before I could really control myself. It wasn’t –  _ fun _ , being out on my own all the time. Without people or connection or someone to tell a story to.” 

“I think about you a lot.” 

“So did I.” 

Bucky is sure that Bruce means it in the scientific way; Bruce has been infinitely fascinated by the separation of the self, or the possibility of multiple consciousnesses existing inside one body, and why  _ wouldn’t _ he be? But what Bucky means is that they think about Bruce all the time, and think about the scars on his chest and wonder what it would be like to touch them, and they wonder what it would be like for Bruce’s hand to brush along their arm when he talks, or what his hand would feel like in Bucky’s hair. 

Bucky doesn’t visit for a while, after that. But they order pizza to the base, just the same. 

  
  


There is a  _ situation _ , and that’s exactly the tone that Sam says it in: because there is a Hulk that distinctly isn’t Banner’s destroying Boston, and Bucky is on a jet before they have time to think, being passed sturdy protective clothing. “Now,” Sam says, “this shit is for real. This guy is insane. Banner says to avoid aggravating him further so we’re going to have to try and sedate him, but fuck me if I know what kind of sedative is going to stop  _ that _ .” 

Bucky is given several different varieties of tranquilliser dart. The SHIELD agent talks them through the difference between each, but Bucky isn’t listening: they’re thinking about Bruce, small and dwarfed in the expanse of his cell, and about the red marks on his arms. There were more with each visit. Bruce had explained it was because they were taking blood to measure levels of radioactivity. 

Bucky is thinking that, underneath the angry green alter ego, there’s someone who’s been scared and trapped for days, maybe months.They tie up their hair, the act just muscle memory now. 

“You thinking about Banner?” Sam asks as he peers out the window. They’re still nowhere near Boston, turbine engines aside. 

“I’m thinking about catching the motherfucker behind this and ripping his arms off,” Bucky says sourly. Sam laughs. 

Really, they’re thinking about the pain.

“Things tend toward entropy,” Bruce had said, once; Bucky hadn’t been sleeping, and neither had he, and both of them were sitting in the kitchen eating ice cream. Bruce was explaining something. Bucky can’t remember what it had been that he was talking about, just that singular statement, the claim that the universe tended towards chaos. They’re starting to feel it now. 

It feels like it’s too long before the jet finally arrives in Boston: bold as brass, Bucky simply jumps from it, landing with a jolt in their knees on a rooftop. It is not difficult to miss this Hulk: it’s not pure green, not like Bruce, but tinged far more with grey. There are bullets in their belt, but they opt to keep the sedatives on hand first. From a distance away that’s growing shorter and shorter comes the grey Hulk, furious and strong, tearing apart entire buildings as he goes; Bucky is no Hawkeye, but they can snipe, and they crouch down, watching the chaos approach. 

Carefully, and with as much precision as they can muster, they squeeze the trigger. 

The dart makes contact - 

and does nothing. 

Bucky swears, trying to calculate if they can make a dash across the rooftops; but there’s no way, not among buildings these high. They don’t have the time to calculate whether they can make it across safely. “Hey, Sam, do you think you could drop me onto the Hulk?” 

“What the  _ fuck _ ?” 

“I’ve got an idea. Just drop me.” 

“Alright, but if you die, it’s your fault, you crazy asshat!” 

Sam circles and grabs Bucky from under the armpits, carrying them through the air before carefully depositing them onto the Hulk’s shoulder; Bucky scrabbles for purchase, hooking their fingers and yanking themselves up, trying to wrestle off the hand coming to pick them off. This Hulk is no King Kong, and there’s only just enough room for Bucky, and they’re honestly beginning to regret the idea when they start to shout. 

“I know you’re scared!” Bucky almost falls, then, but they hold on. “I know they hurt you. But you don’t have to do this. We can sit down, we can talk–  _ oh, shit _ !” They narrowly avoid being thrown off, and groan. Okay, stupid idea indeed. They panic a little, and they think, and then they say the Stupid Thing but it’s a stupid thing that works for Bruce and so maybe it’ll work for this person, whoever they are under the anger. “Think about the sunset. About the sun going down, the sun getting real low–” 

And then the Hulk grabs them this time, and Bucky hits the ground with a crack. 

  
  


“They’re making new Hulks?”

It takes Bucky two weeks to be able to recover enough to visit Bruce again, and they still wince when they sit. By then, information is crystallising: the organisation behind Bruce’s kidnap are confirmed to be those behind this new Hulk sighting, and SHIELD have an idea of who’s involved, and a mission to infiltrate their base is being drawn up at headquarters. 

Bucky had been unconscious for the rest of the mission in Boston. When they had woken up, high on painkillers and surrounded by doctors, they had demanded Sam, and then to know what happened to the Hulk. 

_ Dead _ , Sam had said.  _ They couldn’t sedate him, or get him to stop.  _

“Yeah,” Bucky says. They swallow a handful of painkillers, and rinse them with water.

“So, I guess they didn’t bother to learn from the first one.” Bruce takes a step up to the glass; he’s standing today, for once, looking restless with the news. Bucky wants to tell him to sit down, because nothing is going to happen anytime soon, but they don’t say anything at all. “Are you okay? They told me you got hurt pretty bad.” 

“I had a concussion,” Bucky says. “Some broken ribs, and I messed up a bone in my leg or something. I have to walk with a stick for now.” 

“Like House.” 

“House?”

“Yeah, he’s a doctor in a TV show. It’s a procedural – someone gets sick, no-one can figure out what it is, the rude but smart Doctor House realises it’s some obscure disease, end of episode. It’s one of my favourites.” Bruce sits down to join Bucky. “He walks with a cane because he had an infarction in his leg’s quadriceps muscle – that’s, uh, tissue death. Necrosis. What do you watch?  _ The Good Doctor _ ?  _ New Amsterdam _ ?  _ Doogie Howser _ ?” 

Bucky doesn’t know any of those shows. “I like  _ Grey’s Anatomy _ .” 

“That’s a good one. I love Doctor Yang.” Bruce smiles. His smile is soft, and there’s always a lilt to one side of it, an unevenness to his face that gives it character. “Are you feeling okay? I cracked a rib when I was in high school and it hurt like hell.” 

“I’ll live,” says Bucky. “But it does hurt.” 

Bruce nods. “They’re letting me out soon. Next week.” He’s wringing his hands again. “It’s been lonely without you around. I know I can’t monopolise your time and that I shouldn’t want to, but…” He pauses. “I like talking to you, because you listen, and you don’t tell me I’m boring you and I know I’m not exactly the most interesting person to be around. I wanted to tell you that because I appreciate it.” 

“I like it when you explain things.”

Bruce laughs. “I always think I’m boring people. I’m glad I’m not.” 

There’s a moment that passes between them. Bucky feels a little stirring in their chest. 

“We’re going to try and infiltrate the organisation’s base and shut them down,” they say. “I don’t know if they’ll let me go, because of the leg. But I want to stop them. When I saw the bunker they were keeping you in, I… it reminded me of those Hydra laboratories. I want to shut this shit down. These are people’s fucking  _ lives _ .” 

“I know,” Bruce says softly. “I know.”

“I read more poetry,” Bucky says. “When I was in the hospital.” 

“Do you remember any of it?” 

“ _ The desire of the moth for the star, / of the night for the morrow, / the devotion to something afar / from the sphere of our sorrow _ .” 

“Who wrote that?” 

“Percy Shelley. I like him more than Byron.” 

Bruce laughs warmly. “He’s the guy who wrote  _ Ozymandias _ , right? I remember it from high school.  _ Round the decay / of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / the lone and level sands stretch far away _ . I’ve read hundreds of papers and books since I read that poem and I still can’t get myself to forget those lines. I’ve always been into science, not literature, but…” 

“There’s a reason why poetry lasts,” Bucky says. 

“Some of those lines are really beautiful.” 

“So are you.”

Bucky thinks Bruce’s laugh might come from surprise, and his eyes are wide when he gets up to come closer to the glass, looking amused by the sentiment that anyone might find him beautiful. Bucky gets the feeling people don’t use those sorts of words for him. He’s maybe more well-acquainted with  _ monstrous _ . 

“You can’t compare me to poetry,” Bruce says. 

“Travel back in time and take my words out of the air, then.” 

Bruce’s smile could light up Bucky’s entire week. He looks as if he’s trying to find something to say, something to come back with, but he just sits down again, his cheeks pink. Bucky knows it’s pretentious to cite poetry, and that it has been since the forties, but–

it’s worth it, for that. 

And Bruce deserves to hear something better than the story he always does. 

  
  


Bucky is there when Bruce is released the next week; they’ve spent the week wrangling with SHIELD to be allowed on the mission, and when Bruce steps outside of the facility and feels the cool breeze of the air for the first time in weeks, he says, “I’m coming with you”. 

Bucky leans on their cane. “Yeah, I guessed that.” 

  
  


It’s a big ship that’s selected for the mission, something more of a carrier than a jet; it has something of a cruise ship capacity for rooms, though the rooms are small and minimal. Its size allows for strategy meetings in the air, for extra consideration of their moves and for briefings. The intel provided by SHIELD suggests that the organisation is international and has multiple bases: it seems likely that their work spreads beyond simply trying to recreate Hulks or to strengthen the original. Bruce explains that their intention was to make the Hulk much stronger, and also to give Bruce the ability to Hulk limbs at will. 

“Could you do that?” an agent asks. “Potentially?” 

“No,” Bruce says. “In the same way a werewolf can’t. They’re trying to create something that won’t work: controllable Hulks. It’s just going to lead to disaster.” 

He looks at Bucky when he says this.

The mission isn’t due to set off for another few days. Most of these days, Bruce and Bucky spend in parks and gardens, lazing in the cooling October sun. Bruce has missed the world; Bucky has missed peace. There is now no medical consensus on whether or not their leg will recover, and whether or not they will ever be able to run again, unaided. Bruce tells them it was a bad idea to go so close to a Hulk. 

“I thought of you,” Bucky says. “When I saw him. And how you’re you. Underneath.” 

Bruce sighs. “I’m sorry.” 

“It was my idea.” Bucky rests their head on the grass and shields their eyes against the unrelenting blue of the sky; it’s a nice day, a beautiful one, their last before they depart. “You don’t have to come with us. On the mission.”

“It’s all I know, though, isn’t it? I know that this kind of pain is like, the pain that they’re going through. I feel like it’s my responsibility to help, to stop this, because it’s my fault people think that it’s okay to do this sort of experimentation at all.” Bruce takes a long, deep breath. Bucky decides not to correct him. They could explain to Bruce all day that none of this is his fault, and yet Bruce would never believe it, not really. “This is what I want to do. This is what I was  _ made _ to do.” 

Bucky reaches out, and takes Bruce’s hand. 

“ _ Teach me half the gladness / that thy brain must know, / such harmonious madness / from my lips would flow / the world should listen then  _ – _ as I am listening now _ .”

“Percy Shelley?” 

“You got it.” Bucky laughs. They almost didn’t know that they were capable of the sound. “He’s the only poet I know. Except Byron.” 

They go to bed together, that night: they’ve been sleeping in separate beds, in their own rooms, because Bucky doesn’t really want to risk Bruce hitting their ribs, but now it just doesn’t matter. Tomorrow, they’re going to be in the air discussing Bruce’s worst nightmare and an organisation that makes Bucky’s skin crawl with bad memories. Both of them are used to dark days, and both of them are holding on to the moments before. 

Bucky has a hand resting on Bruce’s chest. They’re listening to the sound of him breathing. 

“You don’t have to come with the mission,” Bucky says. 

“Neither do you,” Bruce says. 

“I have a lot to make up for.” 

“It wasn’t your fault.” 

“These people aren’t your fault, either.” 

Bruce lets out a long sigh into Bucky’s shoulder. “Just don’t do anything reckless this time, because I’d like it if both of us could get back and not be confined to a room this time.” He grins lazily and presses his mouth to Bucky’s. “Did you do any more reading into gender, by the way?” 

“Yeah,” Bucky says. They didn’t read so many formal articles as they did interviews, listening to people talk about their experiences; and many of these had resonated with Bucky. They had listened for hours and hours, to people who looked like them and people who didn’t, and had fallen asleep for two days in a row in front of the computer. “I’m non-binary.”

“Cool,” says Bruce with a smile. “The world needs more queer heroes.” 

That he doesn’t ask any more questions or pester Bucky is comforting; they smile, and press their forehead to the warmth of Bruce’s shoulder and breathe in the smell of his skin and the faint tinge of his deodorant. 

Bruce falls asleep not long after that, the last good sleep Bucky thinks he’s going to have for a while: they look up at the ceiling, and trace a thumb across Bruce’s collar, and they think they have a long way to go, sure, but that this a first step they’re certain of. 

**Author's Note:**

> really hope u guys enjoyed this!! the title comes from the song "mary" by big thief


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